“We’re in the Faraday ward in Southwark which is the [borough’s] most underserved ward,” he says. “One in five young people have issues of mental health, there are high exclusion rates and nearly 3% of young people are not in education, employment, or training.”<\/p>\n
It took Sayce and his team eight years to open but the service is growing fast. With more than 200 teenagers on its books, it’s available every weekday and will soon be welcoming people on weekends.<\/p>\n
It has a mixed funding model from corporate entities to the Mayor of London’s Violence Reduction Unit which secured money from the Home Office to help drive down crime.<\/p>\n
Mentivity is in a healthy financial position compared with other youth groups but, it lost almost half a million pounds of funding last year due to what Sayce says is a growing anti-diversity and equality movement.<\/p>\n
Sayce says he is determined to beat the drum for youth spaces: “We have to recreate the village, we have to recreate communities.”<\/p>\n
“When services are pulled back, there’s a real distinct lack of trust for adults. They take that mistrust, that anger and that frustration back into society,” he says.<\/p>\n
“When you’re feeling let down as a young person and you’re heartbroken that now this youth club is not there, you’re willing to go into other areas just to try and make up for that void.”<\/p>\n
Oh, and he’s not bothered about the term “youth club”.<\/p>\n
He says: “They can call it what they want, but they are here.”<\/p>\n
“They are voting with their feet so we’re not precious around what it’s called, it’s about how they feel when they’re here.”<\/p>\n
Top image credit: Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“We’re in the Faraday ward in Southwark which is the [borough’s] most underserved ward,” he says. “One in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":684086,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-684085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/684086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}